The Audio Wonder Of OneNote

I’ve been playing with OneNote — the Microsoft program that allows you to create and organise notes — quite a bit lately, and I have to say it’s a big leap forward for software.. and Microsoft’s record for innovation.

Here’s an interesting post on a feature I haven’t explored as yet: audio. Wayne reports that OneNote will add timestamps to your text notes as you record audio, so jumping to a particular note will include an icon shortcut to the corresponding part of the audio.

So, say you’re recording a lecture (or an interview, if you can imagine taking your laptop with you): You’re typing (or writing, with a TabletPC) brief notes about what’s being said, but also recording. Hovering your mouse over the notes afterwards will throw up little icons, matching the same point in the recording. Pretty cool.

One comment pointed out that recording audio on a laptop isn’t great. True. You really need an external mike. And while those folk recording lectures, meetings or seminars in civilized environments (quiet, you can get near the subject, power outlets, tables to park your laptop on) should be ok, this is not going to be particularly helpful for us journalists.

For that I’d recommend Olympus digital recorders. Of course there are others but I’ve had one (well three, actually) since 1999 and they’ve been a godsend. The best trick: use an external microphone on a long cable, keep the recorder close to you and use the yellow index button to mark good quotes. When you upload the file to your computer to transcribe, you can quickly jump to the best bits.

Another option if you’re looking to record lectures with your laptop: LectureRecorder.